Why the Metamorphosis? The writer and intellectual Dimitris Dimitriadis presents a special lecture and defines its theme: “Why has metamorphosis always been an inherent, perhaps innate, tendency and need of human beings to become something else, or to be made something else by others, as happens frequently in the mythologies and traditions of all peoples, with the Greek and Roman being particularly prominent. The passage from the Self to the Other is not always into something better, more beautiful, nobler, eternal. Metamorphosis often takes on terrifying, inferior, even humiliating forms, as happens with zoomorphism in the case of Kafka. The great and enduring interest in metamorphosis is not limited, I think, to the event itself, but extends to the why of the event. What makes a person need or want to not remain – for many reasons – what they already are? The appearance of the why and the reasons that provoke it point to one side of that whole that only man possesses: the open identity.”
The Shakespeare Bookshop for two nights moves to the Central Library of Thessaloniki and organizes a Kafkaesque existentialist celebration. Writers, poets, and translators under the auspices of the bookstore transform the Central Library into the home of Franz Kafka. The publisher, poet, translator, and owner of Shakespeare Bookshop, Giorgos Alisanoglou, holds on to a Kafka aphorism (“I am nothing but literature”) and presents an evening based on “The Wound and the Word” translated by Nikos Voutyropoulos. Along with him, the translator Ioanna Avramidou, an expert on Kafka, will give a special presentation. Alisanoglou says: “Kafka’s inner demand for perfection in writing may never have been fulfilled, but without it, it is very doubtful that he would have managed to tell his masterful stories. This anxiety that runs through his letters and diaries turns into the existential anxiety in which his heroes live, in a nightmarish environment, full of fears and threats, with caricatures of people wandering around, sometimes whispering and sometimes shouting incomprehensible words.”
Excerpts from the book will be read (in alphabetical order) by the poets: Giorgos Alisanoglou, Eirini Vakalopoulou, Vasilis Zilakos, Elsa Korneti, Dimitra Kotoula, and Dimitris Leontsakos.